Jersey Shore – Regular Guy

Missing the Shore

brian — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:36:02 +0000

We all lost a national treasure recently. Some of you may not have noticed, but you can trust me when I say many of us feel terrible about what happened.

“Jersey Shore” finished its short season on MTV.

I can’t believe we only got to know The Situation, Snookie and the gang a couple of months ago. They already seem like old friends. I don’t know how much fun I will have with them gone.

Oh, they will probably continue to pop up in entertainment media once in a while. Some of them might even find a way to stay in the spotlight, but it won’t be the same. (We now know there will be a second season. I love this country.)

At least we’ll have the memories of eight episodes, which will live in reruns until something else distracts us. And the many online special interviews which MTV unfurled once they realized they had a hit on their hands.

I don’t know why they didn’t react more quickly. Everyone I knew who followed pop culture and reality TV predicted that the show would do great the moment it was announced.

For years, television executives thought that if you put a bunch of stereotyped people with different personalities in a house together, great television would follow. That worked sometimes, but began to fail more often than not when savvy people figured out how to game the system in order to get more than their 15 minutes of fame.

“Jersey Shore” flipped the reality TV model on its head and put eight people who were, at least on the surface, exactly the same in a house. I don’t think the network realized the genius of this idea until the ratings came in.

Sure, the cast members do not provide the greatest example for our youth, but they provide plenty of entertainment. That’s what reality TV is all about, right?

I used to watch some reality shows when the genre first hit the airwaves, but slowly found myself uninterested in the people begging for attention on camera.

The ridiculous attempts by the shows on MTV to pretend they were seeking people who wanted to better understand each other when all they really wanted was conflict turned me off as well.

So this time they found a cast which had to look at the other people in the house and see a little bit of themselves. That bred a new kind of conflict which, at least for me, truly entertained.

Of course the catch phrases, the fist pumping, the ridiculous outfits and the unique vocabulary kept me coming back for more.

Some people didn’t like “Jersey Shore.” One Italian-American group protested loudly. A few sponsors pulled their ads from the show. People around the shore town during the month of filming badgered the cast.

All that just made me love the show even more. Life isn’t always pretty. I’m not saying I want my daughter to grow up to be like JWowww, or that PaulyD is my idea of a great son-in-law, but the show made me laugh. That’s what matters to me in the long run.

Now if I could just figure out how to fix my hair like some of those guys so I can go have some fun at the shore.

The List

brian — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:49:50 +0000

I started to think about something the other day when I posted something about “Jersey Shore,” aka the greatest television show ever created. I have enjoyed watching The Situation so much, I decided he ranked among the top five people I wanted to have a beer with.

I remember a guy I went to college with telling me that he couldn’t really trust a guy until he sat and had a beer with them. I tend to agree. Even if you don’t drink, the casual attitude at a bar really lets you learn a lot about a person. Plus, a beer takes somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes to drink at a casual pace, so that’s plenty of time to get to have a substantive conversation with someone you find interesting.

The only problem with that declaration was that I don’t recall ever considering what four other people would make the list (inspired by a great storyline on “Friends”). That changes right now. Without further ado, my top five in no particular order:

The Situation, formally known as Mike Sorrentino. He has burst onto the scene with his bravado and humor from “Jersey Shore. He has blown me away with appearances an appearance on The Tonight Show and a Funny or Die video which slayed me.
Peter Buck, guitarist for R.E.M. He was the driving force in the rock return of Accelerate,the band’s most recent album. He plays in several other groups, including The Baseball Project, and is a total music geek. To top it off, the humor and insight of the liner notes he sometimes contributes to the band’s projects would provide for lots of conversation.
Bill Lawrence, creator of “”Scrubs.” My man crush on the man behind one of my favorite TV shows is well known. We almost went to college together. I could have been his right-hand man. Plus, he provides the most refreshing interviews I have ever read. Easily a two-beer conversation.
Jason Segal, “How I Met Your Mother” and Judd Apatow movies. He just seems cool.
Rhett Miller, singer, guitarist from the Old 97s. Ever since I saw him play earlier this year, I have had a slight obsession with the band’s music. A writer and terrific performer, I would love to swap stories with a guy who wrote a line “My name is Stuart Ransom Miller, and I’m a serial lady killer.”

That’s the list, for now. Like all endeavors in this vein, I will probably think of someone else later, and I reserve the right to change things. I also disqualified people like Tim Quirk and Charlie Todd, who I have interviewed for my dear, departed podcast.

We Have A ‘Situation’

brian — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:31:31 +0000

I don’t fall in love very easily. So that should make my undying devotion to the cast of “Jersey Shore” that much more impressive.

I didn’t plan on loving them so much. I had heard about the show and made a promise to watch, but I have done that for a lot of MTV-ish type shows. I generally get turned off by the boorish nature of the participants or just don’t have time to watch. Thank God I made time for The Situation, Snooki and their pals.

Like I said on Facebook after I watched the two-hour premiere, this show should win multiple Emmys. I don’t care if they don’t fit into more than one category. Make some more to honor them. They totally deserve it.

The reality is that while some Italian-Americans have problems with the terms “guido” and “guidette” and the behavior of the cast may seem less than ideal, they come across in most situations – particularly the interviews they do now that filming for the show is over – as decent people who just had a lot of fun on summer vacation.

Take “The Situation” for example. I have yet to see an interview where he hasn’t been self-effacing, arrogant and charming all at the same time. Snooki realizes she’s a big character. They’re laughing with us laughing at them. That’s refreshing in a day and age when so many people seem to go on reality shows to act like someone they think we want them to be. The “Jersey Shore” cast is just themselves, Axe body spray and all.